Integration and Google Organic Stars

Modified on: Thu, Apr 19, 2018

This article looks at the best integration methods for displaying organic stars.

On-Page Integration (Full Integration) and Reviews API (Customised Integration) are the only integration methods that aid the generation of Google Stars or provide Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) benefits. They offer the opportunity to include additional markup around the reviews which Google can interpret to generate a 'rich snippet' which can include stars for associating with organic or natural search engine results.

With On-Page Integration, Feefo has included all the necessary markup so there is nothing to add. To achieve the same benefit with the Reviews API, structured data needs to be added to markup the content so that Google has a greater understanding of its context thereby giving more accurate search results which in turn gives a broader distribution of the content to users. Marking-up content properties can make it eligible for inclusion in ‘rich cards’ and ‘rich snippets’ which for some content types, allows users to engage directly with your content from the search results.

A variety of content type qualifies to appear in these ‘rich’ results. 'Organization', 'Product' and 'Local Business' content types belong to the commerce category which is a custom category that Google uses to describe schema.org types generally intended for retail purposes. See SEO: How Do I Get Organic Stars? for our recommendations for schema markup.

Your website will need to be fully indexed by Google before the organic stars appear and then the stars are generated by the rich snippets. Do keep in mind that it is totally at the discretion of Google whether or not to show the stars. For the best chance of success, it is of paramount importance that all markup is tested for correctness using Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool. This can be found at https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool?url. Even if the markup does pass the structured data tester successfully, the page may still not be eligible for stars if some of the parameters are missing. For more markup advice from Google, see https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/mark-up-content.